Ballot campaigns fund Vegas trips

Certain committees offer fewer restrictions for lawmaker spending

SACRAMENTO  A state lawmaker from Los Angeles has taken four trips to Las Vegas to take in marquee prizefights and host glitzy fundraisers, in one case handing out boxing gloves with his autograph to Sacramento lobbyists in attendance.

Sen. Kevin de León didn’t pay for the jet setting, hotels, entertainment and gloves out of his own pocket or his campaign treasury.

Instead, he tapped a separate account he established to support and oppose ballot measures — committees subject to less restrictive rules that are being used by some legislators to regain the freedom of old-time political hobnobbing.

De León wields considerable power as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which serves as a gateway for most bills to be considered by the full Senate.

De León’s “Believing in a Better California” committee raised $188,150 and spent $168,385 over the last two years. Just $35,400 — about 21 percent of the money spent — went to help pass or defeat ballot measures, according to a review by U-T Watchdog.

Much of the remainder went to consultants, lawyers and toward tickets, airfare and hotels for the high-dollar fundraisers, including fights between boxing superstar Manny Pacquiao and Juan Manuel Márquez, Timothy Bradley and Shane Mosley.

John Shallman, campaign strategist for de León, said the fundraisers are successful and help push an important agenda.

“Senator de León is one of the hardest working legislators in Sacramento, and because of that, he is successful, both in passing big bills that benefit the people of California, but also in raising funds to improve our state,” Shallman said.

Shallman said de León’s efforts help push back against a political fundraising system dominated by billionaires.

“He won’t apologize for using the funds to help balance the state’s budget, to prevent cuts to education and to keep kids out of gangs,” Shallman said.

De León, a Democrat, was not the only lawmaker to use their ballot measure committee for other purposes.

Assemblyman Isadore Hall’s “Inspiration and Hope for California” committee raised and spent about $55,000 over the last two years. None of that went to ballot measures. Instead, the Los Angeles Democrat made a $2,500 contribution to Janna Zurita, who defeated an eight-year incumbent to win a seat on the Compton City Council.

Hall also charged the committee $6,800 to attend a seminar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass. In December, Hall touted the seminar to the L.A. Watts Times, saying, “As a lifelong student, I am always looking for ways to improve my leadership and management abilities.”

He declined to comment through a spokesman.

Phillip Ung, a policy advocate with California Common Cause, said there are few restrictions on how politicians can spend ballot measure committee money.

“These committees have become political slush funds that they spend on whatever they want while raising the money outside of contribution limits,” Ung said.

Candidate-controlled ballot measure committees have existed for decades alongside the candidates’ other committees.

One key difference is that there are no limits on how much money politicians can raise for their ballot measure committees. That has created several instances over the years of the committees receiving $1 million or more contributions from individual sources.

The maximum individual contribution to a legislative candidate is $4,100.

The state’s ethics watchdog agency has moved to clamp down on politicians’ use of the committees. In January 2009, the Fair Political Practices Commission voted to require that funds raised for ballot-measure campaigns be spent on particular propositions. Commissioners stopped short of prohibiting spending on measures before they qualified for the ballot.

The changes were spurred by high-profile examples of questionable spending.

Former Senate President Pro Tempore Don Perata, D-Oakland, five years ago transferred $1.9 million from his ballot measure committee to another committee he established to hire lawyers to fight a protracted federal corruption probe.

Last year, the FPPC fined former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger $30,000 after a ballot measure committee he formed spent more than $1 million on issues unrelated to initiatives. Schwarzenegger’s “California Dream Team” used ballot funds to pay for television advertising amid heated state budget negotiations, commissioners concluded.

The FPPC’s tightened regulations require that ballot measure committees be identified as such and list the names of the politicians controlling them. They don’t restrict politicians from spending large sums of money on general political activities that could be argued have little to do with a specific ballot measure.

“There are legitimate concerns from the FPPC on this, but obviously the legislature doesn’t want restrictions on how they can spend money so they will kill almost any bill that attempts to cut or control these issues,” Ung said of further attempts to rein in the spending.

Many Democratic lawmakers with ballot-measure funds contributed last year to Gov. Jerry Brown’s successful Proposition 30 tax hike and against the unsuccessful Proposition 32, which sought to curtail the political clout of unions. The $35,400 from de León’s ballot fund that went to identifiable ballot measures went to promote Proposition 30 and defeat Proposition 32.

Assembly Speaker John Pérez, D-Los Angeles, gave more than half of the $377,846 he spent from his “Building California’s Future” directly toward those causes.

“There are issues that impact the state and that affect policy that are on the ballot and that are bigger than the speaker as an individual assembly member so he wants to get involved and that’s in particular why he made significant contributions to pass Prop. 30 and defeat Prop. 32,” said Doug Herman, Pérez’s political strategist.

Given the large sums of money politicians spent on consulting and campaign services — without identifying a specific measure — Herman said the standard should be whether the committee produces any meaningful activity, such as giving to an identifiable campaign.

Kim Alexander, founder of the California Voter Foundation, said it’s worth questioning the copious amounts of fundraising, particularly in cases where ballot measure committees only end up spending a fraction of their money on initiatives.

“If the committee is taking in $200,000 and only $20,000 of it can be traced to supporting a particular initiative, what was the purpose of raising the other $180,000?” said Alexander, whose organization works to enhance the public’s access to information about proposition donors.

“Was it simply to feed the fundraising industry, the treasurer industry, the political consultant industry?” she said. “Or was it just to be able to go to all these fun events catered by great cooks?”

De León’s fundraisers at high-profile boxing matches stretch back at least four years. In September 2009, more than a dozen guests attended the then-assemblyman’s $5,000-a-person trip to the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino to watch Márquez fight Floyd Mayweather, Jr. Spending for the event appeared in a campaign finance report from 2011-12.

Over the last two years, the records show de León spent tens of thousands of dollars on boxing fundraisers, including $26,142, $22,722 and $17,100 payments to StubHub. For a 2011 fundraiser in Las Vegas, de León gave boxing gloves to 21 paying guests, including lobbyists whose firms represent banks, defense contractors, labor unions, telecom companies, big tobacco and Indian casinos.

One attendee said the gloves — purchased for $2,300 total in Los Angeles — were signed by the senator and included a message along the lines of “Keep up the fight.”

De León received contributions for his ballot fund from AT&T, Walmart, Blue Shield of California and the California School Employees Association.

Pala Band of Mission Indians, Barona Band of Mission Indians, Viejas Tribal Government and San Diego-based Sempra Energy were also among the contributors.

Doug Kline, director of corporate communications at Sempra, said the company makes political contributions to candidates and issues that are generally in alignment with its point of view.

In a prepared statement, Kline said his company was aware of committees using a range of methods to raise funds for a variety of political initiatives and issues.

“We donate to issues of interest with the expectation that the funds are going to be used for the stated purpose,” he said.